Two hundred years ago the world's "oldest democracy", as Margaret Thatcher liked to call it, was staggeringly undemocratic. The total electorate in England and Wales was a mere 366,000, about 11% of the total of adult males. Constituencies were so unequal in size that more than half the 513 MPs were returned by a grand total of 11,000 voters. Scotland, then a country of two million people, returned 45 MPs, chosen by a total electorate of less than 3,000. More than half of all supposed representatives of the people, in the Commons, were put there by members of the House of Lords, who claimed constituencies as their personal property, to be bought and sold at will. There was a yawning north-south divide: Leeds, Sheffield, Manchester and Birmingham had no representatives, while 21 little towns in Cornwall returned two members each, and the counties along the south coast, with 15% of the population of England, returned a third of all English MPs.

At general elections, bribery was normal, but fewer than half the seats in the Commons were contested, because the cost of bribing a majority of the voters was so high. In many constituencies, however, elections could be bought, and to keep the electors honest they were required to declare, in public, who they were voting for, so that they could not be bribed by one candidate and vote for another. The secret ballot, according to apologists for this system, would have been inimical to the "manly spirit" of the British people – though, as the eloquent radical Henry Hunt pointed out, in gentleman's clubs no other system of election would have been tolerated. This was the constitution, palpably chaotic and corrupt, that some defended as "the perfection of human reason". Two years before the "great" Reform Act of 1832, the Duke of Wellington, the Tory prime minister, declared that the state of the representation of the people had been designed by providence: it "could not be improved"; it had, because it deserved to have, "the full and entire confidence of the country".

Some people, however, whose confidence in the perfection of these arrangements was less than entire, had been campaigning for a reform of parliament since the late 1770s, chiefly motivated by a determination to destroy, or at least to limit, electoral bribery and corruption. It was in the smaller borough constituencies that elections were easy to fix, and moderate reformers believed the answer was to tilt the balance of the Commons more towards county constituencies, where electorates were too big to bribe. Others demanded universal manhood suffrage (almost no one thought of enfranchising women), with general elections every year, so that bent MPs would not have long to enrich themselves before being sent packing. By 1830, the demand from outside parliament for reform was becoming impossible to ignore, and the following year the Whigs, led by Earl Grey, a moderate reformer since the 1790s, brought forward a bill to abolish the most egregiously rotten boroughs, to provide a degree of representation in the Commons to the largest industrial towns, and to reduce the property qualification for voters in borough constituencies to a common standard. The effect was to increase the overall electorate from 11% to 18%. There was still to be no secret ballot, not until 1872.

It seems a very modest proposal, but it outraged many Tories. Both parties were becoming alarmed at the pressure exerted by the extra-parliamentary movement for reform, its militancy increased by economic distress and the rising price of food. Both feared a British version of the revolution that had just propelled the intransigent Bourbon Charles X from Rambouillet to his hideaway in Holyrood. For Whigs, the way forward was to offer reform, just enough to detach the middle classes from their alliance with working-class reformers and so hopefully to prevent an explosion. The Tories, however, claimed that the slightest measure of reform would precipitate, not prevent, an English revolution. Wellington, stupidly wrong as he so often was, declared that even so moderate a reform as the bill proposed would be "a greater political crime than any committed in history". It would lead inevitably, warned the ultra-Tories, to the destruction of property, of the monarchy, of the country.

The manoeuvres that led to the eventual passing of the bill were immensely complicated. There was a struggle, sometimes murderously violent, between the upholders of law and order and those demonstrating and rioting in the street; a furious conflict between Whigs and Tories; and, above all, once a clear majority for reform had been established in the Commons, a bitter standoff between the Whig majority in the lower house and the Tory majority in the Lords. Eventually, the vacillating William IV, under duress skilfully applied by Grey, threatened to create enough peers to ensure that the bill would pass, and Francis Place, the radical tailor, organised a run on the banks under the slogan "Go for Gold". The Lords gave in, apparently preferring to see the destruction of property, king and country than any dilution of their blue blood or the loss of the Tory majority in the upper house.

These were exciting times, and a number of writers have attempted to write a narrative of the bill's passing, including Edward Pearce, a one-time writer for both the Guardian and the Daily Telegraph, whose fine book Reform! The Fight for the 1832 Reform Act was published 10 years ago. So what does Antonia Fraser do that other writers have not done before? I'm not sure. Like Pearce, she relishes what she calls the "drama" of the bill's passage and quotes extensively from the parliamentary debates to bring out their theatricality. The book, she explains, is an attempt not to write "a history of Reform", but "to give the flavour of the times". The first point is right enough: Fraser's understanding of the events of 1830-32 in the light of the earlier campaigns for reform is slight, and this gives her account of the bill's passage a thin, one-dimensional feel. She knows about the mainly gentlemanly Yorkshire Association and the largely aristocratic Friends of the People, but not, it seems, about the far more influential reform societies of the 1790s whose members were mainly artisans. The writings and dialogues she quotes make frequent reference to the language of earlier campaigns for reform, but she seems unaware of these vital resonances.

As for the flavour of the times, it has none of the complexity that the hosts of reality cooking shows look out for. It is the flavour as tasted by aristocrats. We learn that in the early 19th century "the phrase 'the people' generally implied a mob" – and so it did for some; for others, "the people" were the only legitimate source of sovereignty. "The rule of the people", it seems, "was anathema" – and so it was for many, but then again for many it was their ultimate goal. Nepotism, apparently, "was the mentality of the age", and so it was for many politicians, but not for those who saw it as a central feature of "Old Corruption". The point of view of the aristocracy is the default position from which this book makes most of its judgments about what "the age" believed. Fraser sees the opposition to reform of the "traditional Tory aristocrats" as deriving from an innate and deep sense of responsibility to preserve the stability of the country. It was this, it seems, that led them to insist on their right to continue buying votes and trading constituencies, to usurp the role of the Commons by packing it with their creatures, and thus to put at risk the very stability that the moderate reformers were trying to preserve.

Fraser grants a decent role to the middle-class reformer Thomas Attwood and to Francis Place; William Cobbett gets a walk-on part, and is credited with founding the Poor Man's Guardian, which would surprise him. But, in general, the extra-parliamentary campaigners are treated not as the chief drivers of reform but as noises off, to which the noble lords on stage respond. Fraser even thinks aristocrats have a distinctive physical conformation. Not all of them, of course: the burly Lord Althorp, future Earl Spencer, had "nothing visibly aristocratic about him", and Lord John Russell, a son of the Duke of Bedford, was too short for his role. But in the main, aristocrats, are "fine upstanding" men with long "patrician" noses. Remember when the House of Lords was full of hereditaries, basking like seals after lunch on the benches? Banish them from your mind. Think Vinnie Jones instead, or the young Jim Davidson, upstanding men both, with long noses, "visibly aristocratic".

• John Barrell's Edward Pugh of Ruthin is published by the University of Wales Press.